Prior to the telegraph, communication in the 1830s was about the same as it had been in the years just after Gutenberg's invention of the printing press. It took days, weeks, and even months for messages to be sent from one location to a far-flung position. After the telegraph cable was stretched from coast to coast in the 1850s, a message from London to New York could be sent in mere minutes, and the world suddenly became much smaller.

Prior to the telegraph, politics and business were constrained by geography. The world was divided into isolated regions. There was limited knowledge of national or international news, and that which was shared was generally quite outdated. After the telegraph, the world changed. It seemed as if information could flow like water. Most Newspaper offices had a telegraph and so a good number of its news came from the telegraph as stories would be sent from the far stretches of the country and picked up by those listening.